Making the World Safe for Plunder
Mention the word authoritarianism, and controls and crackdowns come to mind. Whether it's Communist regimes such as China, or far-right states such as Russia, authoritarianism entails the suppression of liberties and polices what you can say and do. Yet there's another side of many authoritarian governments that gets less attention: how they lift controls and regulations to ease exploitation of the country's resources and populations.
First, they have to create an environment that rewards the discarding of moral precepts and legal and bureaucratic norms that act as checks on human behavior. Over time, a culture evolves that makes lying, fraud, and plunder of human, natural, and economic resources not only morally acceptable but also more difficult to prosecute.
"Normalization is actually decriminalization, a willingness to forget that such things were once thought of as lawless behavior," I wrote in the Atlantic in January 2017, forecasting what would happen in American government and political circles over the next few years.
If the leader comes into office with a reputation for thievery and connections with organized crime, that jump-starts the process. So does making the government a refuge for criminals who don’t have to learn to be lawless. Amnesties and pardons come in handy here. Criminals had excellent careers in Nazi Germany, and not only as concentration camp guards: Anton Karl, convicted for theft and embezzlement during the Weimar Republic, became head of the Nazi Labor Front’s construction department. His skillful use of bribery to gain contracts was much admired.
Fast forward to the 21st century, when authoritarians may govern in a still-functioning democracy. Then the challenge of creating an atmosphere that supports plunder is greater. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a vocal anti-environmentalist, is a former Army captain enamored with Brazil's past military dictatorship. He looked to the armed forces to quickly imbue the culture of governance with the proper brutal mentality.
He created a "military cocoon", with 11 officers in his cabinet, 6,000 active and retired military in civilian government positions, and other military men at the helm of state-controlled companies like the oil conglomerate Petrobras. This set the tone for compliance with Bolsonaro's devastation of the Amazon, the scale of which has led human rights and indigenous groups to ask the International Criminal Court to charge him with "ecocide."
Trump took a different route. He created a hostile work environment for non-loyalists across federal agencies. Over 100,000 civil servants left, retired, or were fired, most famously at the Environmental Protection Agency. Yet the plunder mentality also spread to the State Department, where Mike Pompeo sought to subordinate foreign policy to profit imperatives. For the Secretary of State, the melting of Arctic glaciers created "opportunity and abundance," freeing up 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil, 30% of its undiscovered natural gas, and new stores of gold and uranium. No wonder the Trump administration wanted to buy Greenland (which was never for sale).
As holdouts for accountability left government service, the Trump administration drew in suitably corrupt people. It revised the civil service employment application to eliminate questions about real estate holdings, finances, and professional references. This made it easier to hire people with unsavory pasts who would be more likely to put aside questions of ethics and support rollbacks to help agribusiness, energy, mining, logging and other sectors practice "extractive capitalism," regardless of the cost to the workforce and the environment.
The density of events during the Trump era meant that the scope and scale of these deregulations and decriminalizations often eluded public notice. And yet they were crucial to the "authoritarian bargain" American elites struck with Trump (profits for them, political support for him) and they advance the neoliberal ethos dear to the GOP for decades.
The Trump administration's hostility to climate policies was no secret. Announcing America's withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement in 2017 was a sensational move. Yet the determination and tenacity of the zealots in his federal agencies, working in tandem to enable plunder, is staggering to consider. They implemented over 100 rollbacks of environmental rules regarding clean air and water, toxic chemicals, and wildlife. They removed protections from more than half the nation's wetlands, and the Department of the Interior abolished restrictions that prevented more lands from being available for oil and gas leasing.
All of these changes made it easier for Trump’s backers in the auto, agribusiness, chemical, and fossil fuel industries to pollute the earth and plunder natural resources with impunity. Oil and gas companies no longer had to report methane emissions. Mines no longer had to prove they can pay to clean up future pollution. Having expectations of accountability and transparency removed from their industries made it easier to accept authoritarian tendencies in other areas - that's how corruption works.
While the Joe Biden administration has reversed many of these measures, the gleeful participation in an intense campaign to destroy the earth and accelerate the poisoning of our children and our environment is sobering. Trump made his cronies and subordinates feel powerful by removing restraints on their behavior, rewarding them for being their worst selves. Getting away with it, no matter the consequences for others and the planet, is the essence of authoritarianism. That is why we must consider it an existential threat.
Right exactly, corruption and authoritarianism unfold as a transaction between Trump and his kleptocrats in government and willing partners in industry that benefit financially-- a sort of (corrupt bargain) Its a common feature of a form a government called [Kakistocracy], which is government by the, worst, least suitable, least qualified most corrupt people. Think of all the thieves and grifters with no background or experience who served the last four years in the Trump administration. Now the Biden administration has the tall task cleaning out the Augean stables left behind by the most epically corrupt and plunderous administration ever in American history.
Succinct and to the point. These neoliberal regimes are populated by thugs and thieves. Underscoring this point is the recent work of Prof. Wendy Brown, a student of Sheldon Wolin who invented the term "inverted totalitarianism" to capture the corrupting of the democratic state. Her work is entitled "Undoing the Demos: Neoliberal's Stealth Revolution."
It is important work that Prof. Ben-Ghiat and others are doing to expose the danger such forces pose for our republic.